Motto : mircea_popescu tvtropes might be the best website on the Internets.i

I firmly believe this to be true. The one good side of the retardpedia was the ample patience with pop culture of its vast if unemployable fanship, resulting in their being incredibly well informed on the many topics nobody cares about that make up pop culture, and also incredibly willing to spend time discussing these in detail. Wikipedia might not have a clue what any item of actual importance or interest is, and woefully misrepresent all abstractions of any consequence whatsoever. Nevertheless, if at issue is to find out if FartFarer was the DukeDickwalker's father or uncle one can always trust the wikidorks got it right.

This all changed dramatically with the introduction of TvTropes a few years agoii. Apparently a select group of actually literate, actually educated editors does a much better job at curating pop culture too, not just everything else. Whodda thunk it! Consequently, wikipedia (the retard encyclopedia) lost the last shred of cultural relevance, as there's literally nothing it does better than other sites, and hasn't been. For years.

Also consequently, the stinky rats of the sinking ship are moving on, trying to bring their oh-so-useful "know-how" and "experience" into other fields, much to the other field's loss. Obviously nobody cares about some random IRC channel being turned into yet another bit of IRC ghetto, but consider this TvTropes article :

Jerk Justifications

There are certain mentalities that create Jerkasses, or at least allow them to tolerate themselves. They come in many versions, but most of them boil down to one of three statements:

Type 1: Kindness is weakness, and Nice Guys Finish Last. If you want to get ahead in this world, you have to be ruthless, mean, and manipulative.

Type 2: I'm right and all these peasants are wrong, so it's OK to treat them like crap just to hammer my point in. The stock phrase "I'm not a jerk, I just don't suffer fools" may be used in their defense, the implied insult of which only serves to prove the accuser's point.

Type 3: That's just the way I am, and I can't (or don't care to) change. Deal with it.

Nietzsche Wannabes, Manipulative Bastards and jerks of every type will self-righteously spout one of these philosophies whenever called out on their hostility, arrogance, and general pissy behavior.

When an author comes to believe this, it usually results in Jerk Sues. When the fans do, a Draco in Leather Pants is born. See also Shut Up, Hannibal! (or occasionally What the Hell, Hero?), a frequent response to Jerk Justifications. If a character's Jerk Justifications are the result of painful experience, can result in a Jerkass Woobie.

Herp. Way to go, anonymous author, at taking your cherished if nonsensical "all people are equal" and "the group rules over the individual by force of numbers alone, as nothing else exists since all people are equal" bits of ideology and proceeding to re-write reality as if they were facts.

Ideology blindness is exactly that : a case where some dork mistakes his ideas about the worldiii for actual underpinnings of the world mechanics (for the case where fiction characters actually believe the script, see Genre Blindness). Afflicted individuals can't on their own come up with very obvious answers to otherwise banal problemsiv as the most visible symptom. Also because their affliction puts the buggy before the oxenv, they're trapped in impotence. Consider : if you really believed the water flow moves the tap, rather than realised the tap makes the water flow or stop, you could conceivably spend your entire life angry at the failure of the tap to follow the imaginary waterflow you're imaginarily drinking from. Then you'd die of thirst, angry and upset with the world, or whatever, the "jerks" in it.

The moral of this story being that yes, wikis you can edit, much like you can edit standards and measures, much like you can change the names you call things.

THIS DOES NOT CHANGE THE THINGS.

———

If you seek context :

mircea_popescu "Thanks to Adrien Chen, the whole internet knew about Silk Road"mircea_popescu dude these media fuckwits need to get a grip.Vexual whats a chen?mircea_popescu nobody ever heard or ever gave a shit about all their little self-famous circlejerkmircea_popescu Vexual some gawker nobody.Vexual well whoever dpr was, he wouldna got so much money if people hadnt heardVexual and thats why that guy got busted, coz the shit went bubblegum, and the real dpr didnt want the troublemircea_popescu but people didn't hear from some schmuck the other media schmucks knowmircea_popescu because people don't give a shit about gawker, and conde nast, and all the rest of it.assbot [MPEX] [S.MPOE] 8796 @ 0.00088986 = 7.8272 BTC [-] {2}Vexual i couldnt even tell you the url for gawker

[...]

mircea_popescu "No explanation is necessary for why our hero can hear a ringing telephone but not the movie's soundtrack, or why the space ship is menaced by the Negative Space Wedgie, but not by the opening credits drifting by outside the ship"mircea_popescu tvtropes might be the best website on the Internets.

I'm not being all negative or destructive or anything here, see ? I am just putting things in their proper perspective. Like John Wayne. [↩]

Really, it's going to have its decade birthday next year, but in good Internet tradition it didn't really matter much for the first few years of that decade. [↩]

Butt tears from the discussion page :

Jerk justification?! There's nothing justifiable about being a jerk. Being jerk is NEVER acceptable and tolerable. People who go for jerks are blind, delusional, and self-righteous.

Now I'm not a goody-goody per say but I don't tolerate jerks because of my experience with them.

About dealing with jerks, I refuse to deal with them. People who tell others to deal with jerks should have bad things happen to them.

You want people to deal with jerks? Why don't you and them deal with people who hate them!

And jerks have to know that they can't go through life being ruthless, manipulative, and mean-spirited. In other words, being a spoiled brat won't get people far in life. They have to be nice and caring towards others but not to the extreme.

Why nobody's shanked them or busted a cap in their skull yet ? Because nobody can, because nobody's good enough, because not everyone is equal everyone else, which means some people are better than others, which means the inferior get to wonder why "nobody" is tackling the superior and why are they such jerks!!1 Next question ? [↩]

Ideologies are ulterior to the existence of the world and flow from its workings. Expecting the world to change to suit ideology, either on its own or through work being applied fundamentally misses the point : it's ideologies that will change, quite on their own, whenever the workings of the world most visible at that point so require. All the angst and "wishing real real hard" of the current crop of otherwise inconsequential sheepsies will go visit the quiet place and a new set of angsty, being wished for "real, real hard" ideological notions will seamlessly replace the current set, put forth by a wholly new sixteen year old stable. Because the world is endless and the people are always new. [↩]

The Straw Nihilist is an extreme version of The Pessimist and a specific type of The Philosopher who delivers Despair Speeches and Breaking Lectures about Life, The Universe, and Everything (or at least how meaningless it is to fight for any of them), often Chewing the Scenery about how the hero/audience lives on an Insignificant Little Blue Planet and morality never existed in the first place. Often Above Good and Evil, due to the Straw Nihilist's Armor Piercing Questions about "What Is Evil?"

"The basis of this trope is the tendency of many Darker and Edgier writers to create a bitter, ill-spirited, confrontational, or downright mean character and still play them up as an ideal person, or just get away with being a bullying Jerkass. The other characters tolerate the antics (which can range from petty to sociopathic), allowing him/her to walk all over them and talking them up in their conversations with each other. Common synonyms include "strong", "tough", and "rugged" while common topics include how much better they've made their lives through their "tough love" or whatever Freudian Excuse supposedly justifies their behavior. It's often an unsuccessful or inept attempt to play on Jerkass Dissonance.

Either way, they're both royal pains in the neck and annoying both to be around and read about. The male version tends to be less common nowadays, (or at least called out more often) as with Marty Stu he's falling victim to men wanting more realistic protagonists."

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